Harvard University made itself the unquestioned leader among American colleges and universities when its president announced that it would not knuckle under to President Donald Trump’s attempts to dictate what can and cannot happen or be discussed on its campus.
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Then the Trump administration’s Homeland Security Department on May 22 revoked Harvard’s ability to enroll international students, according to the Associated Press, announciing that thousands of current students must transfer to other schools or leave the country. According to the Trump administration, Harvard has created an unsafe campus environment by letting “anti-American, pro-terrorist agitators” assault Jewish students on campus, the wire service reported.
Never mind the legalities of what the government can cancel and when. When Harvard acted, other colleges that at first bent the knee (Columbia University is Example A of this) suddenly became braver and changed their minds, saying “no” to many of Trump’s demands.
So far, the action has not centered on California, but it has before and could again at any moment. After all, the move against Harvard came via a letter that was sent out before it was fully authorized, but Trump stuck by it despite the error in timing. In an effort to stave off some Trump ire, several California universities had already made moves.
The 10-campus University of California system, for example, set new rules virtually banning encampments like the pro-Palestinian ones that took hold during the winter of 2023-24 after the Hamas attack on Israelis that resulted in about 1,450 killed or taken hostage. Another move by the UC system banned campus chapters of the group Students for Justice in Palestine.
No one doubts it was Harvard’s $53 billion endowment (think of this as a savings account or ‘rainy day fund” that can be deployed in emergencies) that enabled its President Alan Garber’s defiance and his stand for protection of academic independence and freedom of expression in classrooms.
What would happen, though, if California colleges were suddenly targeted seriously? UC Berkeley, for one example, gets just more than $1 billion in federal grants for research on subjects from wildfires to public health. It gets another $1.5 billion each year to operate the nearby Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the East Bay. UCLA gets $1.1 billion in federal research money.
Amounts flowing to California State University campuses are far smaller, but none of the state universities has an endowment that could let it carry on much research or many other activities without federal funds. Several California schools could carry on quite well, though. That list is led by Stanford University’s endowment of $36.49 to $38 billion (estimates of its exact value vary), which ranks among the top four U.S. universities.
Given that Stanford gets only about 12% of its operating revenue from federal funds and grants, that means The Farm could run just fine for years without help from the feds. Inconvenient, yes; fatal, no — especially since wealthy alumni would likely step up to contribute if Stanford felt threatened. The last time Stanford flashed its bankroll was when it accepted reduced TV revenues for a while when joining the Atlantic Coast Conference after the old Pac-12 folded.
A surprising number of other California schools could also do just fine. Pomona College, with an endowment of about $2.8 billion, according to Forbes Magazine, uses federal funds for a mere 1.4% of its operations. At CalTech, with an endowment Forbes places at $3.8 billion, about 9% of operating revenue is federal dollars.
That’s because CalTech runs the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and all its space exploration programs for NASA, though. Trump is not likely to interfere with that and risk becoming “the man who lost the moon.” Other California colleges that might do just fine include Claremont McKenna College and Santa Clara University.
Yes, much of the endowment money held by all those schools was donated for specific purposes, but if any of them felt threatened they would likely appeal to donors or their heirs to loosen those conditions. So no, other than the big public universities, Trump probably can’t threaten the independence of California colleges, which will come as a relief to some.
Email Thomas Elias at [email protected], and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.
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